Welcome to WVnature.com

Hi! My name is Debbie Norman. I love God, my family, my country, my beautiful home state of West Virginia, reading, art, nature and photography. I have a physical disability but it does not have me. This is my nature journal of the world around me.

This day we took a little trip out around the hill. The whole family. One of the things that I love about being a homeschooling mom is that you can take advantage of whatever moment you like. You aren’t bound by time clocks and concrete lesson plans – or concrete buildings for that matter. And you can turn just about anything into a learning opportunity if you play your cards right. Don’t get me wrong, I value having a great core curriculum, but I love the freedom to explore the things you feel are important as parents and your children’s individual interests.

I’d been wanting to go out to this area to look for things to photograph for a while, but hadn’t felt up to making the walk. Which is kinda sad if you knew how very close this is to my house. But for the shape I’ve been in, it is quite a walk. I realized on the way out that I actually hadn’t been out there for a year. Shocking, but true. My pre-term labor contractions with Ella started at 5 weeks gestation when we nearly lost her due to problems I was having with rupturing ovarian cysts. And I spent the rest of the pregnancy on modified bed rest with regular issues with contractions. So… no walks for me. And since her birth at the end of July, I’ve been dealing with the complications from a botched spinal block and other health issues I have had since that whole mess. But I finally got back out there.

It was gloomy looking, with impending rain, and not a great day for taking pictures. But when how you feel is so variable, you have to take advantage of good moments when you can. So we packed up the family and we all went. Little Miss Ella Rose wasn’t quite sure what we were doing. The stroller had never went out in a walk to the woods before. But she loved it. She just took it all in with such great interest. I love it when they get to this age. The age where things start to “click” and they start to take in the wonder of their surroundings and learn things like cause and effect. She did lots of staring and thinking, and even smiled lots too.

Her eyes were open when I went to take this smiling photo, but she blinked.

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We saw what I think are wild asters on the bank along the narrow foot path. It is very dark through there, even when it is sunny, so the photos aren’t fantastic. But I’ll share them anyway. 😉

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After we made it out there my husband sat at the picnic table and gave Ella her bottle, while I roamed around taking photos, and the kids did what little kids to best in wide open spaces. They ran around, occasionally taking breaks to learn details about what Mommy was taking photos of.

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Someday if I can feel up to it, I would love to get some hostas started out here. The conditions on this area of the property would be perfect for hostas, if the deer didn’t wear them out. With it being a more secluded area, I think we might have a problem with deer eating them.

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I found quite a few different mushrooms, but was only able to photograph a couple before it got too dark.

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Emma likes to find flowers and hold them up and say “Mommy take a picture of this. Take a picture of this.” And I always do, just to make her happy. I really liked the way that this one below turned out though. It looks like you photo shopped it or something. But this is the photo exactly as I took it, only it’s been made smaller in size for the blog.

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Then the lighting was going downhill too fast to get any more photographs. And then it started to rain, so we headed back. By the time we made it close to the house my legs were a mess, but I was still glad that I made the walk. And thankful to have been able to do it, even if I did pay for it afterwards. All in all it was a really nice time. Not that we did anything particularly special. But it was just nice to spend some time outdoors with the whole family.

More from my outing on the 28th. These are some little purple wild flowers. I have no idea what they are called. Back before I had such bad allergies I used to sometimes collect and dry these. But I never knew the name of them.